


For It's Your Misfortune (Ain't None of My Own)

by the_most_beautiful_broom



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Bartenders, Country & Western, F/M, Strangers to Lovers, Title from a Country Song, Western, saloon AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29193714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_most_beautiful_broom/pseuds/the_most_beautiful_broom
Summary: To Murphy, survival means always moving, always looking over his shoulder, never staying in one place for too long.For Emori, survival means keeping her head down, doing what she can to keep her town and her friends safe.But when their worlds intercept at a saloon in a small Wyoming town, both of them will question their patterns, and wonder what this stranger has to do with altering the course of their own lives.//a memori + wild west AU // read the AMAZING followup fic my friend wrote,herefor more of Murphy's story! It's SO good.
Relationships: Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Monty Green/Harper McIntyre
Comments: 11
Kudos: 15
Collections: TROPED Choice: Western





	For It's Your Misfortune (Ain't None of My Own)

**Author's Note:**

> tropes are at the end bc spoilers! Some fun wild west terms I looked up and used here: “high binder”=a dangerous man, “get gaited” = hurry up, “bilk”=cheat, “beef”=to kill, “lead pusher”=gun, “milling”=fighting  
> Also, for conversion rates, $200 is just under $4k in today’s dollars.

He picks up the name Murphy; it suits him well enough. 

He’s seen most of the settlements west of the Mississippi, territories and townships running together in a blur of tumbleweeds and stakes. The forested flatlands of Missouri give way to the brown plains of Nebraska; soon enough, his boots are coated in the dry dust of Wyoming, but he keeps on.

He sleeps in barns, paying his way in services offered to weary settlers. Hay baled in Iowa, acres of farmland tilled in South Dakota, in exchange for a barn roof over his head and sometimes some gruel. He doesn’t ask for kindness and he doesn’t garner pity. On his way through town, the stranger trades gold for jerky and cornmeal, tucks them into a leather pack on his shoulder and keeps on. 

The sun breaks over the eastern sky, casting cerulean shadows behind him as he walks into Sangeda.

It’s early enough in the morning that the rabble are still sleeping, while the enterprising are already at work--Murphy hears the clanging on an anvil at a blacksmiths shop, animals lowing as they’re woken and prodded, the crackle of public fires. 

There’s a rhythm in small towns.

Murphy tries his best to exist outside of rhythms. 

There’s a hotel, somewhere, probably, and a place he could board, but he doesn’t intend to stay long, just passing through as he always has. 

So he scans the buildings as he walks by them, passes the millinery and the general goods store and the church, and then comes to stop in front of a saloon. 

It’s open; they never close. 

It’s empty; they always are at this hour. 

Someone’s in the back, at a table covered in green felt, counting out the house winnings of the night before. He wears a tight vest over a tight shirt, as if anyone couldn’t tell the man was built like a high binder. Someone whose face is hidden in a hat is slumped in another corner, a mostly empty glass clutched in his fingers. 

Neither look up at Murphy when he enters. 

There’s a steady step, and he looks to the rear of the building, when the doors from the back room swing open, and a woman walks out of them. 

She has long dark hair, wears wide trousers that look like a skirt, a muslin shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a glove over her left hand. There’s a Colt six-shooter in her belt. She strides over to the table, looking over the counter’s shoulder for a moment, before resting her right hand on his shoulder, then going behind the bar. She hits a couple of keys on the cash register, yanking the drawer out of its resting place when it dings open, and hoisting it up to the bartop, surveying its contents. 

“A room, a drink, or company?” she asks.

Him, she asks him.

He doesn’t realize it at first, but then she looks up at him, expression curious despite her casual stance, and Murphy wonders if anyone has ever looked at him as she does now, or perhaps at all, if this is what looking’s like. 

“Um,” he says, eloquently, and she almost smiles, the corner of one side of her mouth turning up, as she looks back down at the register. 

“Haven’t seen you around before,” she says. “So, which’ll it be?”

Murphy’s mind dashes a million places before he pulls it back. “Isn’t it a little early for a drink?”

The woman looks up at him, smiles with her teeth. “You’re the one in a saloon, stranger.”

“Murphy,” he says, automatically. 

An eyebrow lifts on her face, a reaction as unintentional as his admission. She didn’t ask, but he’d told her, and she looks at him for a moment longer.

Then back to the register. 

She turns, her back to him, reaches under the bar to grab something, then another thing, and sets a glass on the table. She pours, something amber and acrid, then caps the bottle, returning it to its shelf.

“Welcome to Sangeda, Murphy,” she says, and she pushes the glass across the bar. “Have a seat.”

—————————————————————————

The Lightbournes will be coming through at noon. 

Emori knows it, everyone in Sangeda knows it. It’s the second Tuesday of the month, when the band of criminals that run Northern Wyoming comes through to take 30 percent of her, and every other merchant’s, profits as an exchange for not leveling the town. They’ll take one of her bottles of bourbon, tell her and the rest to count their blessings, and ride off with her cash lining their pockets.

At least they stopped culling the farmsteads. 

Emori wouldn’t call it mercy, just business--the settlers can’t always pay, no matter the punishments the Lightbournes enact, and their terror doesn’t ensure any more coin. So the Lightbournes charge businesses, and they pay, dearly, to keep the bandits satiated and the townsfolk safe.

Safe is a relative term. 

Emori gets the feeling that the man at her bar would agree. 

He’s not from around here, that much she knows. He walks like nothing surprises him and everything tires him, but he has soft eyes. 

A coyote, she thinks, not a wolf. 

A scavenger and not a predator, mean enough when threatened, but harmless enough in the daylight. 

He takes the drink she pours him, looks at it without curiosity, then tipping half of it into his mouth. He hollows out his cheeks a bit, and bares his teeth when he sets the glass down, but doesn’t make a sound. 

Murphy, he’d said his name was. 

She opens her mouth to say something, not sure what, and he looks at her like he knows already anyways, but then Doc jolts awake in the corner. 

Eric Jackson, the doctor from out East who’d meant to pass through but stayed when they needed a medic, coughs, pushing his hat out of his face, squinting at the light. He groans, eyes screwing shut as he rubs them, relinquishing the glass on the table. He’d come in late last night. He’s not one of her regulars, but everyone has off days, and far be it from Emori to judge anyone. 

“Josephine come through yet?” he asks, chancing opening his eyes again. 

Emori leans over the bar to see out of the windows at the front of the saloon, down the main avenue of Sangeda, to the clocktower on top of the church. 

“We’ve got another six hours, give or take,” she says, leaning back over the counter. She pulls a dish towel from under the bar and swipes it over the top, still sticky from last night. 

“You do,” Doc grumbles. 

Emori looks up from the wet cloth and soiled oak. “What do you mean, Jackson?” she asks slowly, nervous. Something on his voice...why would Russell’s daughter be coming into town, instead of himself? Why early? Why specifically for the doctor?

He sighs, notices the forsaken glass, and drinks it quick. It’s nowhere close enough to return him to his drunken stupor, but it wakes him. 

“I mean,” Doc says, “I haven’t had anything to give Russell for three months now, haven’t had money to spare. He’s sending Josephine at dawn to get it, with interest, or drag me behind that buckskin Morgan of hers for a couple of miles...till my pockets miraculously open, or my gut, I suppose. Whichever gives first.”

“Dawn as in now?” Emori asks, knowing the answer.

“Pretty much,” Doc says. He walks over to the bar, step slow but steady. “It’s an odd day when I’m disappointed more people weren’t sick.”

“You don’t look to profit off people’s misfortunes,” Emori says, bitterly. The Lightbournes wouldn’t know a thing about that. She walks quickly down the bar, going over to the register she’d left open when Murphy came in. “How much are you short?”

“Ah, that’s not your worry, Emori,” the man sighs, pulling himself into a barstool. He belatedly seems to register that there’s someone else beside him at the bar, and turns sideways to look at the stranger. “Eric Jackson.”

“Murphy,” Murphy says. “Who’s Josephine and Russel?”

“How much do you need, Doc,” Emori interrupts, not a question.

Both men look at her, and Doc shakes his head slightly. “It doesn’t matte--”

“Damn it, Jackson, Josephine’s probably at your shop now; how much do you owe them?”

He holds her gaze for a beat, then his jaw clenches as he looks down at the bar. “Two hundred dollars,” he says hollowly. 

The saloon is quiet. 

Emori doesn’t have more than twenty in her register, six of which is already for the Lightbournes. In a steel safe in the back, she has another $150, just in case, saved up over the years. But she doesn’t have two hundred. 

“Jesus, Eric,” she mutters.

Doc points at the glass in front of Murphy, who turns it and slides it down the bar. Murphy looks at the glass, then the man who accepts it.

“How does a man come to owe another two hundred dollars?” he asks.

“He doesn’t,” Emori says, closing the register again, the clang of it loud. “Not honestly. But when another man has a band of people who worship the ground he walks on, a daughter who convinces sheriffs in a twenty-district radius to look the other way, and ammunition he bribed off the Confederacy, he gets to demand whatever he wants from doctors who don’t charge their patients when they can’t afford it.”

“Slainte,” Doc mumbles, draining Murphy’s glass.

Emori feels Murphy watching her, and she wishes he’d stop; she needs to figure out what she’s going to do to stop Josie from killing Doc, not wonder what Murphy’s looking for. 

She doesn’t have two hundred dollars. 

If she called everyone in the town together, they probably still would barely have two hundred, and then nothing to live on for the next month, until Lightbourne came back to ask for more again. Then she and the other merchants would be just as--

Emori looks up. 

The other merchants. 

“Roan,” she says, and the man looks up from the felt table where he’s counting last night’s winnings. “Get Harper and Monty in here, Wells too, if you can find him. Doc, get Raven and Gaia, bring them here. It’s where Josephine will come first when you're not at your place, go.”

Roan leaves without a sound, and Doc narrows his eyes at her. “Emori, what--”

“Get gaited, Doc,” Emori says, as close to an order as she can manage. “I would rather not give Lightbourne the pleasure today.”

The man looks hopeful for a moment, then grateful, then he hurries out of the saloon. 

Emori leans over the bar again, looking at the same clock. 

6:24, it says.

Josephine has never been one to be punctual, and she’s probably just icing Doc, but Emori might just be able to work that to her advantage. 

Emori pulls a hand through her hair, wondering if there’s another way.

If there is, she can’t think of it. 

She turns to below the bar, pulling the same decanter out as earlier, and another glass, into which she pours a shot. She refills Murphy’s, he didn’t get to finish it anyways, and then clinks hers against his on the counter. 

It burns. 

She doesn’t drink much, not these days, and she winces as the liquid leaves a fiery trail in its wake. She clears her throat, feeling Murphy’s eyes on her again. 

Have they ever left?

“You ever bilk a bandit?” she asks, and if she didn’t know better, she’d think he’s just been tempted to smile. 

“I thought you were honest folk,” he says instead, and Emori wonders if that’s a dodge. 

“Doc certainly is. Harper, Monty, Wells--the milliner, grocer, the general store manager--them too. Raven’s our blacksmith, and she can be convinced either way. Gaia’s the one foolish enough to try to teach Sangeda religion; she walks the line too.”

“And you?” Murphy asks. He has blue eyes, like a clear clear stream, or the sky in the early morning in the summertime, and Emori thinks that a couple of the girls who rent out some of her rooms upstairs would beef a man for his eyelashes.

She looks down at the bar.

“I’m just trying to keep our doctor from getting strung up.”

Murphy makes a sound that’s a little like a hum, then reaches his glass across the bar to tap against her empty glass. His fingers brush against hers, surely accidental, then he’s back on his side of the bar, drinking deep. 

The saloon door bangs, and Roan is back with the people he was supposed to fetch. He nods at her, then goes back to his spot at the poker table.

“What’s going on?” Harper asks, still fixing a shawl around her shoulders. “Roan was damn cryptic.”

“Succinct,” Monty amends as they cross the room, holding up a hand to Roan, who could not care less for their conversation. 

“Jackson hasn’t paid in months,” Emori says. “Josephine’s coming through to collect.”

“How bad is it?” Wells asks, striding over to the bar. “Can we pool together--”

“Two hundred dollars,” Emori interrupts.

“Shit,” Harper says. 

“Who are you?” Wells asks, noticing Murphy. 

Murphy looks at Wells, pushes the brim of his hat, just a smidge, with his forefinger. “Just passing through.”

Wells’ eyes narrow, but he nods, like it’s a mostly acceptable answer.

Monty looks at Emori, she shrugs, he shrugs, and then the door bangs again. 

Gaia walks in, her black robe billowing, then Doc, and Raven a step behind them both, her face wearing a slight grimace from the quick pace. Emori’s heart pangs; she knows mornings are rough for her friend’s leg. 

“Thanks for coming,” Emori says, and they all line in front of the bar.

“Who’s this?” Raven says, lifting her chin at Murphy as she pulls herself onto a barstool on his left. 

“Just a traveler,” Monty answers for him. He helps Harper onto the stool on the other side of Murphy, leaning against her side. 

“A traveler that can handle a lead pusher?” Gaia asks.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Emori interrupts. “We don’t have much time; Doc owes money that he doesn’t have, and Josephine’s on her way now to get it.”

The group looks around at each other. 

“No offense, Doc,” Raven says, and Jackson lifts his shoulders like he’s past that point. “But I don’t know what any of us can do about that.”

“We can’t,” Emori says, wetting her lips. “Any of us can’t do anything. But all of us...what would they do if we each refuse to pay?”

“You’re not serious,” Monty says, almost laughing, then stops. “You’re serious?”

“They’d burn Sangeda and take it anyways,” Gaia answers the original question.

“There’s no profit in ashes,” Wells muses. “They can’t make money off something they razed.”

“Russell likes a message,” Raven says. “They’d take Doc, probably torch his homestead, and raise our cut to buffet their profits.”

“Damn,” Gaia mutters.

The room is silent.

“We can’t keep paying them forever,” Harper says, finally. “We know what they do with our money...and God knows we could use it ourselves. Someday we’d have to tell them no.”

“So why not make someday today,” Monty finishes.

They know it’s inevitable, they know it’s right, but it doesn’t make it easy.

“It doesn’t sit any better with me than it does you,” Emori says, quietly. “But it’s all I can think of.” 

Harper rolls her shoulders. “Well, we can’t just give them Jackson.”

“We can’t just give them Jackson,” Wells echoes. 

Emori looks across the bar at these people, these friends. They grew up together in this tiny town, grew into the professions of their parents or the delinquents who died off to make way for them. Jackson’s the newcomer, fresh from an Eastern university, kind enough to set up shop to fix busted bones and bullet holes. 

It’s not a little thing to ask of them. 

To stand up to Lightbourne, to risk their everything, for the nothing that Jackson has already lost. 

“You...” Doc clears his throat, looking down at his hands, and up at the group again. “I appreciate this, Emori, all of you, but you don’t have to do this.“

They look around him, over each other’s heads at each other, and they know. 

“Eric...you stayed up for three days straight when my boy had scarlet fever last winter,” Monty says, slowly. “The coin I gave you for that didn’t feel like enough...maybe this is it.”

Harper reaches a hand up to where Monty’s has tightened on her shoulder, squeezing his fingers in hers, lightly. 

Raven nods, too. “Every time the wind changes, I feel it, here,” she taps the bone of her knee, over her trousers. “But I know it’d be a hell of a lot worse if Doc hadn’t set it straight the first time.”

“He’s at every house I go to, to offer prayers over the sick,” Gaia says.

“We might not have to do this,” Wells says, and he reaches around to clap a hand on Doc’s shoulder. “But we will.”

Doc looks down at his hands again, eyes suspiciously wet. “I...I don’t know what--”

“That’s Josephine,” Raven interrupts, sharp, ears attuned to the sound of hooves clopping on the boardwalk. “I shoed that horse; I’d know it anywhere.”

Emori crosses to the end of the bar.

There’s a shelf near the end of it, just before the liftgate, where she keeps a box of bullets and the knife of the man who killed her brother. The gun’s already in her belt, but she picks up the knife. 

Roan rises from the table, and Emori shakes her head at him, as she comes out from behind the bar. “You don’t need a second for discussions, and that’s what this is.”

“Yeah, because the Lightbournes are known for being genteel,” Roan husks, but he sits back down. 

The hooves stop outside, and there’s the soft sound of a smooth dismount. Emori doesn’t wait to hear the light step of Josephine Lightbourne on the boardwalk, just conceals the knife in her gloved hand, and pushes open the saloon doors. 

—————————————————————————

The room is quiet as the saloon door swings shut behind Emori. 

Murphy looks around at the faces beside him, their faces set, determined, expressions solemn. He’ll never understand souls like theirs: loyal and altruistic and principled and convicted, when everything in their beings should be focused on survival. He can’t say he admires it, their purity and simplicity. 

He has long abandoned any similar notions. 

They watch one of the windows in the front, and a moment later, Emori steps in front of it; he knows it’s so they can see her. With the saloon doors being as they are, they’ll be able to hear everything, and Emori stops, waiting. 

A moment later, a small blonde woman steps into the view of the window, a painted smile on her face. 

“Morning, sunshine,” she cajoles. 

Emori lifts her chin. “You’re early, Jo.”

“For our business, maybe. But I have business with your medic.” 

“No you don’t,” Emori says.

Soft enough that it’s simple, loud enough for it to carry.

The smile slides off of Josephine’s face. “I don’t think that’s your call to make, sugar.” 

“Yours either. Tell your father that the doctor hasn’t had a patient in months; he doesn’t owe him anything.”

Josephine shakes her head, sharp. “When did you upgrade from barkeep to accountant?” she sneers.

“I didn’t do that,” Emori says, steadily. “We don’t want trouble, but he doesn’t have anything to pay you.”

“You watch your mouth,” Josephine hisses, and steps closer to Emori. “That sounds an awful lot like disrespect; all my father’s done is protect this town and all we ask in return is a small commission.”

“You know as well as I do that we pay your father so he doesn’t raid Sangeda the way he visits other towns,” Emori says, still calm, expression even as Josephine seethes. 

“We earn a fair living. We’ll expect our percentage from the medic, same as all of you.”

“This time,” Emori says, “the medic will pay the same as all of us. Which is none.”

Josephine blinks. 

Then she laughs. 

Tips her blonde head back, her teeth catching the morning sun, and laughs. 

“Sweetheart,” she sighs, looking back at Emori. “You know how crazy you sound? Do you know what we could do to this town?”

“The next one over is fifty miles south,” Emori says. “Christian folk, decent, but they’re not much for indulgences. No saloon, half the business as this town. You think your father wouldn’t feel the loss of Sangeda just as deeply as we would.”

Josephine’s mouth is open. “All of this for some foreign doctor?”

“It’s long overdue, Jo,” Emori says. “You treat this town like shit, like we don’t pay for your nice muslin and fast horses.”

“We do you a favor,” Josephine spits.

“Give it to someone else,” Emori returns. “There’s nothing more for you here.”

Josephine steps closer, a gun in her hand out of nowhere. 

Murphy’s on his feet, Wells too, but Emori smiles.

She tips her head, and Josephine’s smile thins, and she looks down. 

She has a gun at Emori’s temple, but Emori has a wicked knife at her ribcage. 

“I’ll die fast if you pull that trigger,” Emori says calmly. “But I’ll gut you before I go, and my friends in this saloon will put you back on your horse, so you can crawl back to your father and die in his arms.”

Josephine’s jaw clenches, but she steps back, gun dropping.

The women look at each other in the window, and everyone in the room holds their breath. 

Josephine tucks the gun in her belt, looks up quickly at the overhang of the saloon, then back at Emori.

“I’m going to bathe this saloon in gasoline,” she hisses, “and light a cigarette in the flames as it burns.”

“You try that, Jo,” Emori says. “Tell your father if he wants to shoe his horses here, buy a saddle or a knife or a handkerchief here, get a drink here, feed any of his men with our food, pasture any of his cows with our land, anything, anything to do with Sangeda, he’ll leave us the hell alone.”

Josephine spits on the boardwalk. 

Emori twirls the knife in her hands, raises an eyebrow. 

Josephine growls, genuinely growls, then she turns, ignoring the faces behind the window, and stomps back to the horse.

They hear the sounds of her mounting, then a sharp whistle, and the hooves on the boardwalk. 

Emori taps the blade of the knife against the palm of her gloved hand, face unreadable. She turns, opposite direction of the window, then disappears. A moment later, the doors swing open, and she’s already talking.

“You think we have till noon or just till she can reach camp and come back with a posse?”

“We have till 8, if we’re lucky,” Raven says. 

Emori makes a face. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“Same as before?” Monty asks.

Emori nods, face grim. “The mercantile or the church?”

“The church,” Gaia answers, “we can fit everyone in the basement, no way to get caught in the crossfire. I can ring the bells.”

“Go,” Emori says, agreeing. “Roan, you get everyone off the streets. Wells?” 

The man nods. “I’ll ride out to the school, get the kids back to the church.”

The three of them run from the saloon, spreading different directions. Gaia’s robe billows behind her as she runs down to the church and Roan starts banging on doors as soon as he clears the saloon. A moment later, there’s the sound of pounding hooves, and Wells speeds by the window on a dappled mare. 

“Monty?” Emori asks.

She crosses behind the bar, leaning to the same place Murphy had seen her pull the knife from, earlier. She drops a box of bullets on the bar, then pulls the gun from her belt, spinning the chamber. 

“I can think of a thing or three," Monty says. "Raven, you’re with me?”

“If you can think it, I’ll build it,” she says. “Let’s go. Doc, you too, I could use your legs.”

The three of them leave, at a slower pace, headed to the blacksmith's shop.

“Harper,” Emori looks up from the gun. “I hate to ask, but--”

“No buts,” Harper says, lifting her chin. She smiles, slightly, but certain. “Who I was lets me protect him better.”

Emori smiles back, and Murphy knows those words hold more meaning than he can understand. 

“I’ll grab the inventory from the store,” Harper says, sliding off the stool and hurrying out of the shop. 

Emori slams the chamber of the Colt shut, spins it, then tucks it into her belt again. She looks up from the gun, down the bar to where he is. 

“Murphy, if you’re just passing, now’s a good time to keep passing.”

He is just passing.

He’s a traveler, like they said, like he’d told them. He has places to be, places to not be seen, and caught up in something like this...it breaks every rule in the book.

The book, he thinks, years of doctrine and training and rules and programming that he fights to just exist, to walk down the street as a normal man. 

This is not his fight.

His fight is with something bigger and darker and the way to win that fight is to keep going, keep anonymous, disappear and disengage. 

It’s how he’s made it this far.

But this far, he’s never met someone like this woman they call Emori.

And for that simple reason, nothing greater, nothing finer, he asks, “What if I stayed?”.

Emori stares at him, and he wants to look away. 

Afraid of what she might see, the things she’d understand and couldn’t begin to comprehend, the things he hides the things on his hands, in his hands. 

“This isn’t your battle,” she says. 

“It’s not,” he replies, thinking of a fight that’s farther away than she could begin to understand. 

“They’ll be shooting to kill,” she says, warning. 

“They can’t kill me,” he says, honest.

She narrows her eyes.

He doesn’t look away.

The bells start ringing then, a frenzied sound to accompany Roan’s banging on doors. The town wakes up, the sleepy town that Murphy had lazed through, not an hour ago. 

People know what the bells mean. 

Murphy hears the urgency spread across the town, the hushed clamor of action spurred by desperation. But inside the saloon it’s just a barkeep and a traveler, deciding what is worth fighting for and if there’s anything more than roads and battles that led to them being in this saloon at this moment.

Emori reaches under the bar again, pulls out a shotgun, and a box of bullets; she slides both of them down the bar, and he catches them like he’s been training with these weapons, not their siblings, all his life. 

—————————————————————————

Emori hears water splashing and she thinks that it’s good. 

The townsfolk will drench their houses before they retreat to the church basement, beckoned by the ringing of the bells. 

They can explain it all later.

Harper comes back with her apron full. 

From Monty’s store, she dumps boxes of bullets on the table, holding the labels up for Emori to see, not like Emori will tell her any different. 

She dumps them on the bar, looks between Murphy and Emori but doesn’t say anything. From her own shop, Harper brought a couple of dishtowels, which she tosses across the counter to Emori. 

“I’m going to--” she starts, and Emori nods, not needing her to finish. She should be with Monty. Harper looks grateful, for a moment, then leaves the shop soundlessly.

Emori feels Murphy watching her, still. 

It’s not unnerving, and it’s not flattering, it’s just a steady study. She halves the pile of towels and pushes a stack in front of him, ripping them in thin strips. They’ll dunk half of them into beer bottles, and the rest they’ll prepare as bandages. 

Murphy sees what she’s doing and mimics her movements; they work in silence, rending fabric. 

“Monty said ‘before’,” he says, at length.

“Pardon?” Emori asks, another towel in half. 

“When you first came back in,” Murphy explains. “He asked ‘same as before’.”

He’s very observant, for a coyote.

“After the war,” Emori says, after a moment, “a lot of people headed west...Sangeda’s along the path, the kind of place that looks like easy pickings. We’re not new to defending her.”

She thinks of Raven and Monty dreaming up bombs, Harper’s eyes sharp behind a rifle, the children tucked in doors, away from windows. The houses on the edge of town that would come together to defend each other, the houses that fell and the prices they’d pay. The guilt she felt every time, nestled in the middle of this town, this town whose streets couldn’t stay clear of blood for too long.

Raven took a bullet in her leg, and now Monty and Harper have a child of their own to worry about protecting. That's what she'd meant earlier, with Harper. She's the best shot of all of them, but she's also the only mother. She should've known her friend well enough to know she wouldn't hold her son in a basement when she could have steel in her hands, protecting him.

They’re older now, and that shouldn’t make the consequences less dire, but it does make her wonder what they’re doing it for.

For Doc, obviously.

His debt is the catalyst to a long overdue change.

“No more than any other town in the West, I suppose,” she says, aloud. 

Roan comes back in, shadow large in the door. 

“The people know,” he says. “They’ll be in the basement.”

Emori nods. “Help Monty with whatever he needs.”

Roan is gone just as quickly. 

They know what to do. 

It's the same plan they've always had, one that they've honed over years of raids and ambushes, by barbarians and men carrying badges as an excuse.

Years fall away as memories take over. 

Monty and Raven rig everything they can, stretch ropes across the avenue, gunpowder near the places where men will dismount from their horses. After they prep, Monty will be with the people in the church, the kind of calm they need him to be. Raven will be in the alleys, pockets full of matches, darting between fuses waiting to be lit. Roan and Harper will be on the rooftops, long distance rifles deadly and hidden, guarding the ways in and out of Sangeda. Doc will be behind the bar, no good in a fight, and their biggest liability, ready to help as soon as anyone takes a hit. 

That’s as far as memory takes them. 

This time around, Josephine will lead her father and whoever is left of their group to the saloon.

Emori will be waiting. 

She will stand with Gaia and Wells and Murphy too, and they will do their best not to get killed, but someone will fall and someone will remain. 

To the detriment or salvation of Sangeda. 

At a quarter to ten, they all meet back at the saloon. 

The milliner, the general store manager, the grocer, the doctor, the preacher, the barkeep, the poker player, the wanderer. 

Emori looks around the circle. 

“Didn’t think this is where I’d be when I woke up today,” Wells says, and the group laughs.

“Didn’t think I’d be anywhere at all, by this hour,” Doc says. “Thank you. Thank you all.”

Monty and Raven both reach for him, reassuring. 

“You’ve done it for us,” Harper says. 

They need to go. 

Set up their posts around the town, be ready whenever the Lightbournes do come. 

They don’t do goodbyes, never have, it feels like bad luck. Just look at each other, long and hard, then leave and don’t look back. 

The saloon seems empty. 

Wells stands behind the bar, braced if he needs a buffer, unfurling and recoiling the long black whip he prefers in closer fights. Doc is somewhere near his feet, behind a steel-reinforced panel of the bar, safe and out of sight. 

Gaia sits on the top of the stairs, a distance rifle in her hands, from the vantage point; they can hear her muttering to herself.

Emori is in front of the bar; she knows Lightbourne will want to talk first. But she’s not ready to be convinced, so she holds her knife lightly, spinning it across the back of her hand. Murphy is beside her, and she’s not sure what that means. 

Why he’s here, why he hasn’t gone, what he expects to see, and why he’s willing to join this fight that isn’t his. She looks at him, from the corner of her eyes. 

He has the shotgun in his hand; it looks foreign there. Not like he can’t handle it, but like something would be more natural. His face is blank, but the kind of empty that comes from intentional clearing, not vapidness.

Realistically, most nothing about him is natural. 

He has normal hair, a normal face, normal clothes, remarkable eyes, but that’s just a partiality of hers. But for all the normalcy, there’s something else. 

They can’t kill me, he’d said. 

Emori wonders what kind of hells you must walk through to become invincible.

She knows he knows she’s studying him, so she looks away. 

“I don’t know you,” she says. 

“Would that change anything?” he asks.

She doesn’t know that it would. “It would explain some things.”

“Like what?” Murphy asks. 

A lot of things, she thinks. 

“For starters,” she says, rather than fully open that door, “Why I feel like I can trust a stranger in a battle that’s not his.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Towns like this breed trust. It’s how you survive out here.”

Emori looks at him again. “You from a town like this?”

Something passes behind his eyes, and he squints down at the gun again. “I’m from a lot of places.”

Emori thinks that maybe that’s true of all of them. 

“Where are you going, then?”

He doesn’t answer that right away, either. “Just going,” he says.

She’s not sure what else to ask, but she knows there’s more.

She thinks he probably has more he wants to say, but his face is still blank. 

Two shots ring out. 

There’s yelling and horses whinnying, there’s clamor and more shots and the posse is here. They’ve hit Monty and Raven’s traps. 

More shots. 

A rumbling explosion, then another, then deeper shots, as Harper and Roan start shooting. 

More yelling.

The explosions are closer, Raven’s fuses blowing a path to guide the Lightbournes to the saloon.

Emori feels Wells stand up straighter, and Gaia sits up from her crouch on the steps. 

“Head down, Doc,” Emori says.

There’s a step on the boardwalk, then another.

“Give us a prayer, Gaia,” Wells says. 

Another explosion, and more shots in the distance, and the steady steps on the boardwalk.

“Judge between us and our enemies,” Gaia’s voice floats down from the stairs. “Stir up thine own strength along us, give not this battle to the strong, but those who ask thy defense. Grant a full reward as it is due.”

“Amen to that,” Murphy mumbles.

“Amen,” Gaia says. 

“Emori, darling,” a light voice drawls from outside the saloon, “I’m back.”

“Hey, Jo,” Emori calls. “You’re welcome back, just not as a patron.”

“That’s what we came to talk about,” a deeper voice calls. 

“Lightbourne?” Murphy asks quietly, curious.

“The same,” Emori says, then raises her voice. “Alright, Russell, talk.”

“Your medic owes me money.”

“He’s not mine,” Emori calls. “He’s the town’s, and his job is to keep everyone healthy, not bankroll you.”

There’s a sound like clucking, like Russell can’t believe he’s been so misunderstood. “It’s a business arrangement, surely you understand.”

“If that’s the case, then we’d like to renegotiate the terms,” Wells calls. 

“Ah, Mr. Jaha,” Russell calls. “Figured you’d be there.” 

“Are you negotiating or trespassing, Lightbourne?” Emori calls. 

“That’s the tricky business of negotiation, Emori, you need to be holding the cards.”

“That’s the tricky business of business, Lightbourne, you need to be above board. Like not demanding two hundred dollars from a doctor.”

The porch is silent. 

“I don’t want to burn this town, Emori, I like it.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“It’s mine or it’s no one’s,” Russell says. 

The door swings open. 

They throw something smokey, no flames, just a projectile, something that stings her eyes and makes everyone cough. 

And then the shooting starts. 

—————————————————————————

Murphy hasn’t fought in years, in decades, but as soon as his vision’s blocked, it’s like he’s back in training. 

He remembers every battle, every command, every whisper in his head and he goes. 

He knows the gun is for shooting, that it’s effective to the townsfolk like that, but he spins it in his hands, and a club feels better, closer, more right. 

Each time, before he swings, he checks--no glove, not Emori, no whip, not Wells--then he connects. He pulls. 

He feels it inside of him, the power growing, glowing, that he’s tried to suppress. 

The thing he’s the best at. 

The thing that is killing. 

He thinks of a blonde woman with a child in a church basement, and he thinks ‘unconscious, not dead’, and he lets go of another man.

Of a preacher with a killing weapon in her hands who will pray penance for this for years to come. 

Of a blacksmith with a brace in her leg, still crouching and running in alleyways to set fires to save her friends. 

Of a barkeep with brown eyes like colors he hasn’t seen in a long time, who looks at him like he hasn’t been seen in a while.

Pull it back, he thinks, disarm, do not kill.

For them. 

Besides, killing is what leaves a trail. Tapping into this, is what gets him caught. 

Two more figures appear through the smoke and Murphy steps, feels his chest glow because it’s too easy, it’s so easy, after all these years, and their heads crush together under his hands. 

He can feel Wells, fighting on the other side of the room. 

It’s almost funny, he thinks. 

They fight the same way, pulling them in, knowing they’re stronger up close. But Wells pulls with the whip, and Murphy pulls with--Emori yells. 

Murphy snaps, finding her through the smoke, knowing where she is, like Wells. 

She’s standing, she’s fine, but Lightbourne is close, and then Murphy’s hands are on Lightbourne’s throat, closing over the skin, thin like paper, over a tube that carries air into the rest of his body and Murphy thinks that it’s interesting how men’s eyes widen when they’re cannot breathe, as they realize the thing they’ve always been able to do, something’s stopping them.

It’s how Murphy feels every minute, every moment when he’s not like this, activated. 

The smoke is clearing. 

“Don’t even think about it,” Gaia yells, and Murphy knows that wherever she is in this room, Josephine stopped in her tracks, realizing the preacher’s rifle is trained on her skull. 

Murphy loosens his grip.

Wants to tighten it when he realizes what he’s done, that he’s waiting for orders, waiting for the kill command, always the good dog. 

Emori blinks through the smoke, and Murphy knows what she sees, knows what Wells sees. 

There are two people felled by Gaia’s rifle, four on the floor where Wells was, three with knife wounds near the bar.

On Murphy’s side of the saloon, there are seven men, none with gunshots from the rifle he’d once held. 

“We’re gonna talk about that later,” Wells says, under his breath to Murphy, and Murphy thinks that’s fair. 

He also thinks of how much time he has. 

How quickly word travels, how quickly people will find out, and they’ll talk, and the people they talked to will talk and this is not what laying low and just passing through looks like. 

“Get out, Lightbourne,” Emori says. 

The man is gasping, still flailing, and Murphy lets go. 

Lightborne collapses, hands on his throat instinctively. 

“You’re welcome back,” Wells said, echoing Emori’s words from earlier, “just not as a patron.”

Find another town to bully, Murphy thinks. 

He thinks it too hard, because Lightbourne looks at him, suddenly, eyes wide. Like he heard it. 

A shot rings out, and Josephine yelps. 

She’s clutching her hand, blood pouring through her fingers, her trigger finger shattered. 

Gaia cocks the rifle, a casing falling to the floor, clattering down the steps. “I told you not to try anything,” she says. “You tried to draw on my friends; you’re never drawing again. You heard them. Get out.”

Damn, Murphy thinks. 

Josephine is sobbing, Russell is wheezing, but everyone else from the milling is still. Unconscious or dead, neither makes a difference now. 

The Lightbournes struggle to their feet, tripping over themselves.

They won’t be back, Murphy knows. 

Emori clears her throat. “Nice shot, Gaia.”

“No kidding,” Wells says. “Doc, you good?”

There’s a bang, and the doctor clambers out from behind the bar. He looks startled, but none the worse for wear.

“Take him to check on Harper and Roan?” Emori asks and Wells nods, cocking his head. Doc jumps around the bar, falling into step beside him. 

Gaia floats down the stairs, leaving the rifle cocked against the bar. “I’m going to go tell the folks at the church the good news. I’ll send some of them back to help clean up around here.”

“Thanks, Gaia,” Emori says, smiling. 

The preacher leaves, and Murphy thinks how much can change in a matter of hours.

The saloon is quiet again, emptier even than it was when he first came in. 

He feels Emori looking at him, and he looks at her. 

He doesn’t see what he expects.

Something’s off, something in her face. Her expression is glazed, the alertness from earlier gone, faded as the adrenaline from the fight ebbs from her system.

But it’s more than that.

Because as her smile for Gaia fades, she laughs, almost guilty. 

She pulls her gloved hand away from her side, where the muslin is glued to her skin with seeping red liquid, an angry gash in the fabric, and Emori crumbles.

—————————————————————————

Emori’s glad it worked. 

Winning against Lightborne, obviously that was the intention, but beyond that she’s glad she was able to get everyone out of the saloon before they realize she’s been shot. 

It’s bad. 

She knows it’s bad before Murphy sees it, and that’s a part of why she’s okay with him seeing it. 

She didn’t want her friends here, didn’t want to see their faces when they realize she’s dying. It makes her a coward, she knows, to want to go without seeing their pain. The last image she has of them is whole and unsoiled. 

It’s selfish to want to leave with that.

But it makes this easier. 

She’s sorry to make Murphy deal with this. 

Somehow she knows he’s seen people die before, held them as they left. He will survive her death as well, just a stranger.

She blinks at the ceiling of her saloon, wondering how she’s looking at it, or if she should worry that she can’t feel her legs. 

She must be on the floor, then. 

She doesn’t remember lying down, but she also doesn’t remember the day being cold, but she’s suddenly freezing. Her teeth chatter and she feels her whole body break out in shivers, or what she can feel of her body. 

She really needs to reapply the wallpaper on the ceiling; it’s peeling near the middle.

A face appears above her. 

Floppy hair, blue blue eyes. 

He’s not looking at her, which is a shame, because he does have such nice eyes. It’s fair, Emori would probably find a gaping gut wound more interesting that her face too. 

He’s saying something, but she tilts her head at him, trying to listen, but it’s hard. He’s muttering to himself, and Emori’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to be listening, because it doesn’t make sense. “I didn’t want this, I didn’t even kill, I tried not to, I just want to be left alone, I don’t want this. It’s not fair, I tried so hard to just--”

“Your name’s not Murphy,” she says.

“What?” he says, and he looks back up at her, eyes wide. His hands are red, which is funny, because she didn’t remember his hands being warm. 

“You’re not from around here and your name’s not Murphy.”

“Last name,” he mutters. “You’re going to be fine.”

“Not really,” Emori says, and the shivering stops. 

The shivering stopping can’t be good.

“Thank you,” she says, suddenly.

Murphy looks up at her, surprised. “Sure.”

“No,” she says, and she means to hit him, but she doesn’t think her arms move. “Thank you. You didn’t have to help, but you did.”

“Yeah, fat lot of good that did if you’re still like this. You’re like this and Cane will find me, and it’s not fair--”

Emori frowns. She didn’t know he had this many thoughts, and they sound like panic. She doesn’t like that she’s at the root of them. “You can go,” she says, “Sorry.”

“What?” Murphy blinks. “Are you kidding, I’m not going to go. It’s not your fault either, it’s...well, it doesn’t matter. Does it. I’m here and I helped and you’re going to be fine.”

Emori’s not shivering any more.

Her stomach feels warm, which is odd.

It feels warm, and her toes do too, and when she looks back at Murphy, he doesn’t look so panicked, he just looks focused. 

Emori wishes he’d look at her.

He has such pretty eyes, and she’d like to look at them. 

But he doesn’t look back up at her face, continues to look at her stomach, which feels warmer and warmer, and Emori closes her eyes, and thinks that of all the things she’s done in this life, dying is not the worst. 

—————————————————————————

Murphy feels when she slips unconscious, and a part of his mind says ‘good’. 

Maybe she won’t remember.

She’ll remember some of it.

She’ll remember the fight, the bodies, the bruises on Lightbourne’s throat. If he’s lucky, she’ll remember the drink and a half she poured him, or that she knew his name wasn’t Murphy, not really. 

His hands are warm, warm on her stomach as he does the thing that’s stronger than the killing thing. 

The energy inside of him, deep within, the kind that sends up a homing beacon to the people hunting him. The thing that activating means running and maybe not escaping but what choice does he have? 

The bleeding stops. 

The bleeding stops and the wound closes and if Murphy were in better practice, he could take the scar, too. But he hasn’t practiced, hasn’t done this or anything close for years. 

So there will be a scar. 

His hands are burning when he’s done.

The transfer during the fight, the command of Lightbourne, and now healing Emori...his trail will be hot for months.

It’s okay. 

He looks down at the woman on the floor, in her glove and bloodied shirt, on the floor of the saloon she saved the town with. 

She’ll wake up, in a couple minutes, decide what to tell her friends, but probably omit most of it, since it’s ludicrous. And they don’t know she’s been shot in the first place. 

He picks her up. 

It’s not graceful, but he does it, off the floor and onto one of the long benches along the outside of the room. Her head lulls at the angle, sharp and unsupported. They’d pulled almost everything from the room in preparation for the conflict, so he unravels the neckerchief around his neck, rolling it tightly and placing it under her head. 

She never told him her name.

He heard it, so he supposes it’s the same.

His hands are burning now, smarting, and he presses them together, silences them. 

He needs to get moving.

So he remembers the goodbye they gave before the Lightbournes came into town-- a long look and no words, and then no looking back.

—————————————————————————

Emori wakes up suddenly. 

She wakes up. 

She’s alive?

She feels her side, her shirt drenched in blood, but her skin smooth and unbroken. 

She’s on a bench in the saloon, the poorly wallpapered ceiling above her, and she’s alive.

There’s footsteps outside the saloon. 

A couple townsfolk come in, explain that Gaia had asked them to come over, help clean up. Emori sits up, quickly, tells them where to drag the busted chairs and the broken bodies. The sheriff comes by to escort the ones that’re still breathing to the jail.

Emori stands up, toying with the neckerchief that’s not hers. 

It’s not hers. 

She looks at it, calico. 

She’ll give it back to him someday.

He’ll make it away from whatever he’s running from and he’ll come back to Sangeda. The town will be cleaner, brighter, and she’ll figure out what his actual name is.

Raven comes in, they embrace for a long minute. 

And if Raven notices the red on her shirt and the neckerchief in her hands, she doesn’t say anything.

————————————————————————— 

Time passes.

Years and months, as the hunted eludes the hunter, then destroys the hunter.

He keeps the name Murphy; it suits him well enough, now that he’s finally free. 

He’s seen most of the settlements west of the Mississippi, territories and townships running together in a blur of tumbleweeds and stakes. The forested flatlands of Missouri give way to the brown plains of Nebraska; soon enough, his boots are coated in the dry dust of Wyoming, but he keeps on.

The sun breaks over the eastern sky, casting cerulean shadows behind him as he walks into Sangeda.

Past the blacksmith shop, past the public fires, past the millinery and the general good store, and the church, and then he comes to stop in front of a saloon. 

There’s a woman behind the counter, dark hair and wide trousers, a glove on her hand and a calico neckerchief in her hair.

She looks up at him.

He looks at her.

And she smiles, a sight like a sunrise. 

“Which’ll it be this time?” she asks, and even her voice sounds like it’s smiling. 

“All offers still open?” he asks back, thinking of another morning, a lifetime ago, knowing she remembers it, too. 

She pulls two glasses out, sets them on the table. “Let’s start with this one, yeah?”

Murphy thinks that as far as starts go, he couldn’t imagine a better one. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Theme: Historical Western  
> Trope 1: one character is an alien  
> Trope 2 (western trope): Barkeep  
> Trope 3 (western trope): Saloon AU  
> Trope 4: Character gets shot/stabbed/BADLY injured, and they hides the wound somehow, only to accidentally (someone else touches them and their bleeding, they collapse, etc.) reveal later that they are mortally wounded!


End file.
